Earlier this week, I posted about a planned change to the way smart-banners behave in the Firefox Affiliates program. Our dev team had proposed that we start using JavaScript on these particular buttons to get the images to change state.

Many of you had thoughts about this (awesome, thank you) and shared them with us in the comments and in other channels. As such, our devs have decided to try reworking the feature without using JavaScript, while fixing our major problems with the current implementation of these buttons.

I’m going to be starting maternity leave at the end of today, but our developer Mike Kelly will be watching my blog comments to respond to questions and thoughts on this. We’re also working to get our mailing list fixed so this can be discussed there as well.

Do you have this lovely yellow Affiliate button hosted on your website or blog? If so, this post is for you.
As we are updating the look and functionality of the new site (check out some of the features coming on the Affiliates wiki), we’ve found a better to way to make smart banners work. Smart banners detect the version of Firefox that a visitor to a website or blog is on. If they’re on an older version, they get an update message. Up to date? They get a Firefox brand message. It’s a pretty neat feature and we’re hoping to have more banners that work like this in the future.

However, the Affiliates dev team has decided to change how we make the update banner work. Previously, your banner embed code would point to a special image on the Affiliates site that changes depending on the browser version of whoever is viewing it. In the new system, the banner embed code detects to user’s browser and changes the image to point to the upgrade banner if necessary.

We’re making this change because the old system was difficult to maintain and difficult to extend to other banners. With the new system, it will be easier for us to release new banners that do more than just switch images based on the viewer’s browser, meaning a larger selection of banners for you to choose from.

The downside is that, after the change, existing smart banners will not longer switch to the upgrade message. Users will always see the “Different by Design” brand image. There are only a select number of Affiliates using these banners and I will be sending notifications to all of these users directly to warm them of the change when the new site launches later in the spring. At that point, they can replace the embed code on their sites with the new banner.Have any concerns or questions about this change? Drop us a note at affiliates@mozilla.org or drop by the #affiliates irc channel.